Scenery Thoughts - the Rural idyll in miniature

As I have said before , I have a lot of scenery, not as much as other people, but probably more than your average Kings of War player.

This scenery has been built up over the course of 7 or so years and came from an old skool Warhammer Fantasy Battle background ( because that was where I came from too) and as such it is starting to show its age. It is all still very functional and, in fact, as I type this I am getting ready to ship my terrain collection in its entirety down to Nottingham in England for this Years Clash of Kings Tournament. This means all my showpiece models come out to play , wizards Towers, Blacksmiths , inns and other table centrepieces. I also have a large number of smaller buildings and this Year I have doubled up my efforts with the presentation of my woods after the “Great Tree Famine” of 2023 when I was unable to fully populate the woods on 15 tables of scenery due to the forgetting of a box of trees.

Frantic eBay, Amazon and Temu purchases has expanded the tree selection and a lot of basing effort has paid off, I will post pictures of the Tournament in a blog write up later on.

For now the purpose of this article is to channelise my meandering thoughts over what is better, Each table being an individual themed table, resulting in multiple different visages for players to absorb. I have seen several examples of this where each mat has tailor made scenery to match it.

Or do I go down the “rural Idyll” route where every table has the same number of identical pieces on it for ease. Resulting in multiple tables that can be set up with the same map so that every player is ,in essence, playing on a level playing field( see what I did there ?)

Currently I am in a mid position. When I first started TO’ing Kings of War I had 6 Tables all with green mats and 6 complete matching sets of terrain that matched, all produced in one session and made to be as uniform as possible. Then I stared to add different mats to my collection, wasteland, Lava field and Snow field. As each tablemat arrived I made a set of scenery for each table which matched the colours of the tables.

Therefore I have arrived at the conclusion that I should continue as I have started. I will expand the strictly competition scenery to make green sets for level playing fields and themed for different mats, however I am going to depart from my standard 10 piece format to match the Epic Dwarf/Dash 28 maps, that is

2 Hills

2 Blocking Terrain

2 Woods

2 obstacles

2 Difficult Terrain pieces.

To make the themed tables a bit more themed, so more hills on a desert terrain and less woods, if the mat looks marshy then more difficult terrain and less hills and try to be a bit more inventive with the nature of the Obstacles and difficult. I think this will allow me to be a touch more adventurous with my scenery and still keep the rural idyll. Obviously the prime Terrain Directives of Robustness, playability and storeability must all be observed. But once again I shall be diving into my making terrain books and scouring the internet for inspiration.

For my Reader that remembers the Swamp piece I made and blogged I will be trying to do some more step by steps of the terrain I build, not as tutorials ( there are a lot more talented Terrain builders out there after all) but just so you can see my basic techniques that may help motivate you, the reader, to make some terrain for your table to enjoy playing Kings of War over.